The Toronto Theatre Review: Lucas Hnath’s Dana H.

By Ross

I was thrilled to be back taking in the complex fascination that lives and doesn’t speak inside of Lucas Hnath’s mesmerizing Dana H. To say he ‘wrote’ this play is the oddly angled part of its complication and structuring, but as the set-up on stage quiets us all down inside the Factory Theatre which is the presenting stage that is housing Crow’s Theatre‘s Canadian premiere, the perplexing and fully engrossing dark curiosity of the play draws us in with a sharp flip of a light switch. This construct and recorded formula, one that I first saw at Vineyard Theatre in NYC a number of years ago (and then once again on Broadway with the formidable and magnificent Deirdre O’Connell), take us down a non-verbal rabbit hole of trauma, abduction, and violence that hypnotizes beyond anything one can have imagined. Sometime back in 2015, Hnath, probably bathed in that same curiosity, asked his fellow theatre-making friend, Steve Cosson to sit down and interview his mother about that time in her life when she disappeared without a trace for years. Over several days, the two talked, centering their voices on the unbelievable timeframe in 1998 when Hnath was away in school at NYU and his mother was abducted. The play digs in and tries to unpack what happened back then with a formula that fascinates, about a happening that she has kept completely silent about until that interview. 

The conversations were recorded. Hnath’s mother talked, and Cosson listened, something akin to, but not exactly, amateur therapy. Now, I am a psychotherapist in the real world, and it’s clear to see that Cosson was, at least in these orchestrations, by no means qualified. His delivery stutters and stalls with a hesitant shocked quality. A not surprising stance, as the story being told would make the most seasoned therapist lean in incredulously. The recording that we are privy to, of Cosson’s awkwardness and Dana’s remembrance, elevates the disconnect, making the drama, surprisingly, even more vivid and difficult. It must have been overwhelming for anyone who listened to these tapes, but Cosson dutifully stayed the course, being curious and interested as he assisted her through the re-telling of her traumatic story. She unpacks with a stuttered sense of purpose, revealing the truth about a truly devastatingly difficult series of incidents that took place in 1997, and we are her captivated audience from the moment the recordings start.

Dana H., the play, focuses in on a very personal experience that unfolded over twenty years ago. The playwright’s eye is tuned in quite intently on his own mother, Dana, who has the most disturbing story to tell. And unlike any other play I have ever seen, Hnath is doubly determined to have his own mother’s voice literally heard by us all as clearly and authentically as humanly possible. It’s quite a feat of strength and persistence, this unpacking, resonating a certain type of bravery from all involved.

Played out intricately and succinctly in an armchair with a cheap motel room as a telling backdrop, courtesy of a clever strong scenic design by Andrew Boyce (NYTW’s runboyrun, In Old Age), a harrowing story of violence and abduction unfolds,. Paired with an extremely sharp lighting and subtitle design by Paul Toben (Studio Theatre’s The Wolves), the woman at the center doesn’t really want to shine the light on her five-month kidnapping ordeal. It’s too uncomfortable for her to talk about it, she tells us. She’d rather keep the story to herself, checking in on it from time to time to make sure her vivid imagination wasn’t playing tricks on her once again. But as those five months when she was violently kidnapped and held against her will unfold in this expert theatrical retelling, the details would shake the core of anyone, particularly when one has been forcibly removed from their family and their life in that way.

But here’s where the nuance begins, and the otherness of the delivery sets in. Sitting in that chair center stage, we have been gifted with the magnificent Jordan Baker (Broadway’s Suddenly Last Summer) who takes on the damaged Dana H., embodying the woman’s every move while never actually making a sound. She, who was the standby for the Broadway production, delivers this woman forward with an exacting presence, but instead of telling Dana’s story to us directly, she lip-syncs her words and movements with a startling and purposeful precision, melting the two frameworks together in a blinding act of magic and recorded adhesion. It’s deafeningly exact, assisted by the fine work of illusionist and lip-sync consultant Steve Cuiffo (Signature’s Old Hats). But the power of it all lives and breathes inside Baker’s perfect dedication to this real woman and the forcefulness that vibrates out. Baker’s stunning depiction resonates as strongly and deeply as the story itself.

Dana H. is an astonishing piece of creative craftsmanship and conceptualization. It’s a play, without being written as such. It has a drive and a power that exists inside of its solid construction, but in that formulation, it has been sliced up and pieced together with a solid deliberation for the art of deposition. The woman seated upright and nervous at its center hasn’t spoken about her trauma to anyone for many many years. So this is, in a way, a tense and intense gift of acknowledgment to her son, by invitation only. It’s hard to describe the dramatic framework that is being presented most deliberately here, other than to say that it rolls itself out like an emotional cassette player, delivering a thoroughly perplexing recorded memory play orchestrated by the always-fascinating writer Lucas Hnath (The Doll’s House, Part 2; Hillary and Clinton). 

This is the unique skeleton key of Dana H., and exactly the room we are placed inside of. We have been gifted the actual recordings of that very difficult conversation, edited into a majestic dramatic theatrical piece that defies description. It is unlike anything anyone has experienced before in live theatre (I believe). There is a complicated wonderment in the dissociation that happens within our senses, and how it forces us into a space that really makes us lean in and take notice. The spliced delivery of recorded voices being perfectly lip-synced by Baker forces us to pay attention in a way that elevates the connection. Working with Hnath’s wickedly wise sound designer, Mikhail Fiksel (PH’s The Treasurer), the two built an audio track that matches the horrifying story-telling ideal in its dangerous electricity, to drive home the complicated thesis that good and evil do exist most wildly right outside the door. Maybe even inside that hotel room that glows in the back just behind her miraculously vanishing and reappearing self. Part of the tension is wondering how that room will eventually be used, and in a way, the cleaning up that happens, and the peering out, electrifies the situation, making us really feel the fear and inescapability of the room. It’s confusing and mind-altering, recalibrating the trauma into further dissociated and scrambled qualities, leaving an ignored bloody stain for us to take in, and see how it doesn’t affect the situation.

As directed with the exacting clarity of abstract vision and force by Les Waters (PH’s For Peter Pan on her 70th Birthday), who also directed the Vineyard and Broadway productions with the same crew of designers, Dana H. unfolds in brilliant tense electrifying snaps of sound and light. Drenched by the hypnotizing examination of control, power, fear, and trauma, Dana H. hypnotizes, while being bruised in helplessness and horror. Costumed by Janice Pytel (Steppenwolf’s Middletown), the play holds us by force in its captivating truth, dissociating itself sometimes from the depiction like Dana did. It doesn’t disappoint, as we thoroughly engage in its tight restrictive structure. The added symbolic gestures of cleansing and the layering of jumbled sound clips end up only emphasizing the confusion of time and continued torture. It’s chaos made for only our senses to understand. Baker is as trapped as she is gifted by the taped recollections of painful trauma, giving her almost no leeway to grab hold of the material herself and run away with it. Yet somehow she does.

Dana H. is a completely compelling and utterly disturbing play that brilliantly stamps its unique inventiveness in such a precise and enlightening manner, parleying out its detailed true story with a strong sense of purpose and intensity. It delivers the events in such a traumatic and emotionally scarring manner that it is hard to understand completely how these things could have actually happened. The trauma and the shattering of Dana H., the woman and mother, have played havoc with her insides, fracturing the ideas of her memory, recollection, and personal storytelling for far too long. To get some sort of inner salvation, light does need to be let into that hotel room, so life, in a way, can hopefully return to the living, and maybe reconnect her soul to those parts that might have been lost in the process.